I just realised that it has been quite a while since I last published a food related post. Today, I am gonna share a really simple but scrumptious recipe. I love eating seafood since I was really young. However, I only started to eat mussels when I was in Australia that offers abundance of fresh seafood.
Mussels are quick and ridiculously easy to prepare. The best mussels that I have had so far was in Brussels. Oh well, they are famous for Moules Frites, so I think they are still the top so far.
This time, I opted for herby tomato sauce that goes really well with mussels. One important note to make this dish is to get really fresh, juicy and ripe plum tomatoes. Also, fresh mussels.
Ingredients:
500g fresh mussels
1 onion (chopped)
1 clove of garlic (chopped)
some olive oil
3 plum tomatoes (skinned, deseeded and roughly chopped)
handful of flat leaf parsley (chopped)
fresh ground black pepper to taste
lemon wedges
Method:
1. Fill the sink with cold water and one by one scrub the mussels, removing barnacles and tugging off the “beard”.
2. Discard any open mussels as they are dead.
3. Rinse thoroughly several times and set aside.
4. To peel the skin off tomatoes, simply cut a shallow big cross at the bottom of the tomatoes. Put the tomatoes into a boiling water for about 30 seconds. Remove the tomatoes and place them into a bowl of ice water for about 5 minutes.
5. Remove the tomatoes from the ice water. The tomatoes should still be very firm, with the skin wrinkled and hanging off of it slightly. Peel them off.
6. Cut the tomatoes into wedges. Then, cut under the seeds, close to the flesh. Remove and discard seeds.
7. Heat up a pan and drizzle some olive oil. Put in chopped garlic and onion and gently cook until fragrant and soft. Then, put in the chopped and deseeded tomatoes and cook until they are soft.
8. Heat up a saucepan with some water. Once it’s boiling, put in the mussels in the saucepan with lid on. Give it a stir after about 2-3 minutes and put on the lid again and give them just a minute more. Then, discard any mussels that have failed to open.
9. Drain off the mussels, reserving some of the cooking liquid. Set both aside.
10. Once the tomatoes are soft enough, pour in the reserved cooking liquid. Cook until the sauce get slightly thicken. Put in the chopped parsley. Then, season with freshly ground pepper.
11. Put in the mussels. Stir well to let all the mussels coated with the sauce. Cook for just another 2 minutes just to heat up the mussels.
12. Dish the mussels in a bowl and serve with a wedge of lemon.
